Gordon and Donna Clark experience a similar discrepancy of desire, where Gordon, like Boz, learns he never had the relationship he though he had at all. Giving up on an overly taxing camping trip, the Clarks opt for a staycation; with the kids out of the house, this mainly means the chance to stay in and fuck all day. (“We haven’t had sex twice in one day since the Ford administration!”) Their chemistry is warm and sweet and sexy and wholly convincing…until the camping trip comes up again as pillow talk. To his unvoiced but readily apparent horror, Gordon learns from a laughing Donna that she found their annual outdoor excursions tolerable at best, “insanity” at worst. When she wakes the next morning, Gordon’s passive-aggressively cleaning the mess they made in the kitchen and unilaterally canceling the plans they’d made to continue the romantic weekend by going out for breakfast together. “Everything alright?” Donna asks, sensing that the answer may well be no. “Yeah,” Gordon lies. “Everything’s fantastic.” Suddenly their relationship seems doomed in a way that not even Gordon’s affair and hidden illness, Donna’s secret pregnancy and abortion, or their countless workplace clashes made plain.

I reviewed last night’s Halt and Catch Fire for the New York Observer. This show consistently surprises in the way real life surprises.

“You should have stayed in your lane,” Stechner lectures him; the clarity of the point makes the anachronism of the idiom forgivable.

It might be tempting to apply the same lesson to Pablo himself. Isn’t his story a case of a guy getting too big for his britches, sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong, and getting his whole face blown off? I submit that the answer is actually “no.” It’s true that Escobar’s excommunication from Colombia’s House of Representatives is what touched off his cocaine-fueled civil war against the state, and that he feels this took place because “the men of always” saw him as an interloper. But the behavior of the CIA, the DEA, the Search Bloc, the anti-communist guerrillas, and the various elected officials assigned to oversee them all are proof that there’s nothing unusual about what Escobar did other than whom he did it to. This is how everyone behaves. They’re all right at home. The only real rule Pablo broke was the one against being on the losing side.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

By now it should be clear just how methodically, I mean Breaking Bad Season Five–level methodically, Narcos is dismantling its main character’s ambitions. In eight episodes, he’s gone from the world’s seventh-richest man to just some dude in a jeep being driven around by a cabbie named Limón. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

I reviewed episode 8 of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

By now it should be clear just how methodically, I mean Breaking Bad Season Five–level methodically, Narcos is dismantling its main character’s ambitions. In eight episodes, he’s gone from the world’s seventh-richest man to just some dude in a jeep being driven around by a cabbie named Limón. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider. Getting close now.

Whether you’re conducting it or evading it, a massive manhunt can be a real grind. That’s the message of “Deutschland 93,” the seventh episode of Narcos’ bleak second season, and it’s delivered with grim efficiency. From the specific subplots involved to the camerawork that captures them, this episode shows that as the hunt for Pablo Escobar nears its terminal phase, it’s exacting death by a thousand cuts on nearly all of its participants. Except Los Pepes, of course, who are doling out the cuts themselves.

I reviewed Narcos Season 2 Episode 7 for Decider.

But the real star of this soul-crushing show is Wagner Moura’s Pablo, whose slow-moving swagger has almost imperceptibly morphed into just plain slowness, a sort of walking-wounded shuffle. His family is gone, beyond his reach whether they’re in Colombia or abroad. The stress causes him to pass out. His attempt to strike back is a catastrophic case of overkill. His disintegration is encapsulated in a version of the signature shot in which the camera swirls around his unsmiling face, a shot we’ve seen time and time again: This time, that shot’s out of focus.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

No one believes me when I tell them this — no one except other critics, anyway — but I’m in the liking-things business. When a television show is bad I’m going to say so, and when it’s really bad I’m going to say so hard. But the pact I’ve made with myself to stay relatively happy and sane is to assume, at the start of every episode, that there’s every probability that I’ll have considered it time well spent by the closing credits. If I didn’t want to enjoy myself every time I sit down to watch a TV show, I wouldn’t watch them for a living, you know? Bad shows don’t fulfill my pessimistic expectations, they disappoint my optimistic ones. Even in the case of Fear the Walking Dead, a series I think is not just “bad” but also ethically and politically noxious, I’m out here every week looking for diamonds in the rough. If the best I can come up with is cubic zirconium, hey, I’ll take it.

I reviewed this week’s Fear the Walking Dead, and wrote a little bit about my vocational philosophy, for Decider.

What follows is a gruesome shootout in full view of Pablo’s beloved family. Shot in a pair of long takes in order to emphasize the chaos, it’s a deliberate contrast with the similar long take that highlighted Pablo’s relative security at the beginning of the previous episode. It’s a smart choice in that it keeps the focus not on the Boss but on his terrified family, outgunned employees, and invading enemies. As a viewer, you get to see and feel what life is like in Pablo’s orbit — you’re an expendable bit player in the drama centered on him.

The result is, at times, genuinely moving. There’s a moment when Tata, her daughter in her arms, rushes through the kitchen where Pablo’s exchanging gunfire with Los Pepes; he’s just a blur with an absurd “Golf Masters” sweatshirt and a machine gun, frantically waving his arms and shouting “Get out! Get out! Get out!” between rounds as his family flees for their lives.

And when the family reaches safety — sans Carlos, who’s dead, and with Pablo’s mom humbled and his wife devastated — his daughter asks a brutally naive question: “Daddy, how will Santa still know how to find us?” Kudos to Wagner Moura for making Pablo’s reaction not a controlled emotional implosion, but a weird, awkward, trembling hiccup. That feels much more true to the unbearable experience of having to account for your failure to a child you love.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider. The show is doing very smart things with mirrored shot set-ups, as hopefully this review and the last one taken in tandem indicate.

By now it’s no secret that Narcos doesn’t do flashy. So far this season I’ve seen this mostly leveled at the show as an insult — it’s trying to do for Scorsese what Stranger Things did for Spielberg and company, with a similarly shaky grasp of everything that makes the filmmaker in question not just Fun but Great. For me, it’s what separates this show from Stranger Things. If Narcos were simply trying to ape Marty, Francis, et al, it’d have all the surface-level razzle-dazzle but none of the black-hearted soul.

So it’s worth pointing out when the show genuinely does do something Scorsese-esque. In episode five of its second season, “The Enemies of My Enemy” (these titles are getting really cheesy, incidentally), we’re treated to a long tracking shot that would make Henry Hill on his way into the Copacabana proud. With Col. Carrillo in the ground, Pablo is living, well, the life of Pablo — giving his adorable kids diving and swimming instructions, joking around with his jolly sicarios, cheering on his favorite football team, goosing his lovely wife’s bum. (Tata Escobar’s posterior is as much of a costar this season as Joan Holloway’s décolletage was in Mad Men.)

The intent of this multi-minute shot is to show that for Pablo, everything is in its right place, at least for the moment. You don’t need to be flashy if your rare instance of ostentatious camerawork is as communicative as this.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

The worst part, by far, is Elena, the mad fascist…hotel manager. Yes, this winner of a character willingly sentenced an entire wedding party to death when one of their number turned zombie. Why? “I had the hotel to think about. We were at capacity.” Oh, well, alright then! “I contained the situation,” Elena explains. You know who else “contained the situation,” Fear the Walking Dead? You might say that Elena found the final solution to the guest question in her hotel.

It’s not inconceivable that Elena might react to a sudden zombie outbreak in her hotel’s ballroom by locking everyone at the party in with the dead. Had she been shown to be panicked, preoccupied, or even just a little nervous about reports of “the sickness,” that kind of snap decision would make sense. On the contrary, she blows off the mother and father of the bride’s concerns about the dawning apocalypse mere seconds before the dad drops dead. (A tidy bit of plot-hammering right there!) In that light, her reaction to the infection of a paying customer, and his sudden decision to chew the face off his child in the middle of their father-daughter dance, looks either insanely sociopathic or insanely poorly written. But hey, this is Fear the Walking Dead — why choose?

I reviewed this week’s Fear the Walking Dead for Decider. This show is fascist, right down to the philosophical incoherence.

SPOILER ALERT

It’s long been my contention that the single greatest act of cinematic revenge belongs to Robert De Niro’s bank-robber character in Michael Mann’s crime epic Heat. (Spoilers ahead, though really this is just a signal that you should go watch Heat immediately.) Discovering the location of an associate who betrayed him, he risks everything to infiltrate the hotel where the man is being kept under guard, distract his protective detail, break into his hotel room, and kill him. But does he just shoot him in the back of the head, like so many mobsters from The Godfather to GoodFellas have been content to do? Hell no. “Look at me,” he demands, then shoots the guy in the gut, then in the head. If the point were simply to kill him, none of this would be necessary. But the point is to make sure he knows he’s about to be killed — knows he’s in the process of dying, in fact — and knows why. Otherwise, what’s the point?

This is a lesson Pablo Escobar has clearly internalized. In “The Good, The Bad, and The Dead,” the cornily titled fourth episode of Narcos’ second season, Pablo quite shockingly gets the drop on Colonel Horacio Carrillo, the ruthless Colombian police officer who’s been his nemesis from the jump. Though he and his men are peppered with bullets, Pablo insists on delivering the killing blow himself. “Look at me,” he says. “Look at me,” he says again, repeating himself just as De Niro’s character did. He then fires the bullet Carrillo sent to him as a warning into the man’s leg before finally delivering the coup de grace to his head. Pablo understands that there’s no point in simply defeating your enemy. He has to know he’s being defeated, he has to know he has no hope of not being defeated, and he has to know who has defeated him. Death isn’t enough. Agony is paramount.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

there’s more to television than plot, or plot twists; there’s more to character than dialogue; there’s more to acting than line readings; there’s more to narrative fiction than figuring out what comes next. A sequence like the one that juxtaposed Dom’s confrontation with her suspects and their assassins with Elliot and Angela’s kiss shows how sight and sound, score and cinematography, body language and silence can produce an emotional effect far beyond the sum of its parts, and irreducible to sound bytes about “How ‘Mr. Robot’ Season 2 Lost Its Way.” On a show this good, getting lost — alone in the dark, the roar of the approaching monsters growing louder by the second — is the way.

I reviewed tonight’s magnificent Mr. Robot for the New York Times, with a focus on the gorgeously constructed final sequence.

And when people go under, they sink like stones. Brought to an everybody-who’s-anybody party for Silicon Valley movers and shakers by Diane, Boz appears to be in his element — cracking jokes, telling tales, and generally cranking up the Texas charm. Indeed, from calling an audible during the Swapmeet buyout and driving down its price by a small fortune to bantering with Donna and the boys in the office, it’s this ability to command a room that attracted Diane to him in the first place. But in an ugly exchange that perfectly reproduces the brittle civility of enemies pretending to make nice, Joe MacMillan takes Boz’s number, calling his affable-backslapper routine a “performance.” Just last week Joe referred to himself as the product he’s concerned with selling; apparently he recognizes some of this in the old Dallas salesman, too.

By the time Boz makes his way back to Diane, Joe’s words have clearly dug in deep, reinforcing doubts he’d already had about his role at Mutiny and his place in their world at large. Unfortunately for Diane, she unwittingly echoes Joe’s veiled insults in a failed attempt to praise her date. She compliments him for the way he naturally steals the show at the party, but what he hears is further evidence that he’s some kind of dancing monkey, trotted out there for everyone’s amusement. As Diane flirts, it at first seems like Boz is oblivious, but before long it’s clear he knows exactly what she’s up to and is simply rejecting it. “Somewhere along the line I lost my taste for tobacco,” he says when she offers him a smoke, then adds “And champagne. Parties.” His tone grows more pointed with every word, his bonhomie curdles visibly on his face, and the overall effect is like biting on tinfoil. Thus a potential romance storyline that seemed like such a delightful sure thing when it was first hinted at just last week is swept off the board, because, well, that’s how things happen sometimes. Cold as this is, there’s still something warm about watching the baffling rhythms of legit emotional reality play out on a TV show.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Halt and Catch Fire for the New York Observer. The command this show and these actors have over human behavior is gobsmacking at times.

I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that “Our Man in Madrid,” the third episode of Narcos’ second season, has this running theme of ersatz arts criticism, though there’s no reason to believe it’s anything more than a fun visual leitmotif to return to throughout the hour. However, there’s a deeper resonance to this device than what’s visible at first glance. As I’ve been saying throughout these reviews, the beauty of Narcos is that it doesn’t try to have a Moral Of The Story. How can it? What is the story, after all, but “A crook made billions of dollars and went berserk, so a pair of governments went even more berserk until they finally murdered him”? This is not True Detective Season One–style paean to the bad men who “keep the other bad men from the door,” either. Escobar and his associates are loathsome. The Cali cartel members who play both sides are loathsome. The various military, law-enforcement, and intelligence agencies involved in the hunt for Pablo are loathsome, though at least at times guys like Murphy and Peña are capable of recognizing their own loathsomeness and not bothering justifying it. In a world like this, the self-glorifying self-portraits or image-burnishing fine art you attempt to immortalize yourself with is a bad joke. You’re spiritually pissing on it even when you’re not literally pissing on it.

I reviewed the third episode of Narcos’ increasingly ruthless second season for Decider.

It’s one of the most famous sequences in cinema history, and probably the single most influential sequence in the gangster genre bar none: the baptism/massacre montage in The Godfather. (Or as Christopher Moltisanti from The Sopranos would more familiarly put it, “in One.”) You know the deal: While Michael Corleone renounces Satan at the christening of his godson, his hitmen take down every rival mob boss from New York to Las Vegas in various elegantly choreographed ways — a bullet through the eyeglasses, a tommy-gun volley through a jammed revolving door, a shot in the back and a fall down a massive flight of steps, and so on.

This episode of Narcos, “Cambalache,” gave us the show’s own version, and it’s telling how much less grandiose the whole shebang is. Forget the Catholic symbolism, folks: Pablo Escobar is too busy slow-dancing with his lovely wife Tata in one of her endless succession of flow-y flattering dresses to recite prayers in Latin. And there’s nothing elegant about how his goons slaughter Medellín’s cops, unless you consider drive-bys, hand grenades, and a few point-blank executions elegant. As the premiere already proved, Narcos just isn’t the kind of show to play to its characters’ delusions of grandeur, or play up delusions of its own. It sees Pablo’s story as too straightforwardly sordid, too pointlessly wasteful, for all that. It plays things straight, and is a much more enjoyable, if less spectacular, viewing experience for it.

I reviewed the second episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

“Okay,” groans DEA agent Steve Murphy as the second season of Narcos begins. “Here we go again.” Friends, that is the sound of a show that took Socrates’s advice to Know Thyself. Stepping into the prestige-gangster void left behind by the departures of Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire, Narcos has never taken the stylistic risks of those shows (bilingual scripting aside). It’s not as flashy as either its larger-than-life subject matter, the multibillionaire druglords of cocaine-era Columbia, or its Scorsese-indebted, voiceover-narrated, tapestry-of-criminality format would lead you to believe.

Rather, it takes its cues from its central performance: Wagner Moura as the lethal, laconic legend of the drug trade, Pablo Escobar. Portly, poorly rested, perpetually stoned, yet the most dangerous international criminal (non-government-official edition) this side of Osama Bin Laden, his reign of terror over his country rarely requires him to ruffle his own feathers. He simply stares into the distance, his dark brown eyes glowing beneath thick black eyebrows, then issues an order in a deadpan baritone and gets on with his day. His exploits may be unbelievable, but he takes it all in stride. So does Narcos, the most low-key series about a gigantic manhunt for a mass murderer you’re ever likely to see.

I reviewed the season premiere of Narcos for Decider, where I’ll be covering the Season 2 daily. Woo!

The malevolent beauty of “Mr. Robot” Season 2 is such that knowing and not knowing are equally unpleasant options. The show’s twists earn it constant comparisons to films like “Fight Club” and “The Sixth Sense,” but its ability to create and sustain the look and feel of a bad dream has much more in common with David Lynch’s roughly contemporaneous, twist-based mind-benders “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive.” You’re no better off on one side of the reveal than you are on the other.

I reviewed tonight’s creepy Mr. Robot for the New York Times. A point I’m trying to make here is that an overly literal focus on Elliot’s dissociative identity disorder, either in terms of twist-based plot mechanics or psychological realism, misses the point, which is to viscerally illustrate powerlessness and dread.

Best Drama
The Americans
Better Call Saul
Downton Abbey
Game of Thrones
Homeland
House of Cards
Mr. Robot

WILL WIN: Mad Men, the final jewel in the crown of TV’s New Golden Age, wrapped up its run with a triumphant final season last year — and Game of Thrones still beat the damn thing. Despite the long-overdue appearance of The Americans and the well-deserved debut of Mr. Robot on the Best Drama list, look for the Khaleesi and company to repeat the feat this year.

SHOULD WIN: We said it last year even while we were hedging our bets:“No series on TV thinks bigger or strikes harder than Game of Thrones.“ With its stunning dual climaxes — the jawdropping “Battle of the Bastards” and the destruction of seemingly half the cast as Cersei Lannister settled all family business — the show left it all on the field this year, and deserves the gold.

ROBBED: While Showtime’s smart, sexy The Affair and Lifetime’s breakout reality-TV satire UnREAL had to settle for Best Supporting Actress nominations to even get their feet in the door, the year’s two biggest turnarounds from their first-season woes, AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire and HBO’s The Leftovers, were unjustly shut out entirely. Any of those four shows deserve the slots occupied by the Downton Abbey/Homeland/House of Cards trifecta.

I predicted the winners of all the major Emmy Awards categories for Rolling Stone. As is custom when I theorize or prognosticate, this is 100% real and serious and definitive; I am right and I will be proved right. Don’t @ me.

5. Joe MacMillan, inscrutable guru. Of all the masks Joe has put on — yuppie hard-charger, friend in need, devoted husband, employee of the month — this is by far the funniest, most fascinating, and most convincing, because it’s essentially a performative version of what he already is: a cipher, a riddle even he doesn’t know the answer to. Why not make other people do the work of figuring it out for him? Bearded and aloof, he can be all things to all people: a coke-orgy hedonist, a bottom-line businessman, a Time magazine cover icon, a power-to-the-people tech ecumenicist, a rip-it-up-and-start-again maverick, a gnomic mentor for an up-and-coming genius. In fact, it seems like he hired Ryan to help him figure out his next step as much as the next step. “I am the product,” he tells the kid, arguably his most honest admission. Earlier, as Ryan slinks home the morning after Joe’s big soiree, his roommate asks “Was that fun?” “I don’t know what the hell it was,” Ryan replies, courtesy of a beautifully baffled line reading by actor Manish Dayal. You and Joe both, Ryan. You and Joe both.

My review of this week’s marvelous Halt and Catch Fire for the New York Observer came in the form of a list of the wonderful things about this week’s marvelous Halt and Catch Fire.

But no one here is more poorly served than Andrea, the actual victim of the murder. Repeatedly shown through surveillance footage, crime-scene photos, a bikini snapshot, and Naz’s flashbacks — culminating in him remembering her sweet and seductive smile just as he smokes heroin at the spot near the bridge where they hung out together that fateful night, like it’s her fault he’s there doing that now — she is rendered ethereal and ill-omened, like a fairy-tale creature who lures men to their doom and is doomed herself. Never mind that Don Taylor estranged her from her dying mother and made life in the house she was left a living hell. Never mind that her financial advisor slash boyfriend stole her entire fortune, then stabbed her to death between beating prostitutes. Never mind the countless shots of her nude and mutilated corpse throughout the length of the series, or the reduction of her life to the drug problems every character makes a point of saying “no no, don’t reduce her to just her drug problems” about without ever saying anything else. No, the important things to remember are Naz, the man who was wrongfully accused of killing her; John, Box, and Freddy, the men who cleared his name and saved his life; and the DA, his mom, and Chandra, the women who damn near fucked it all up for him. She’s a footnote in her own story — a tragedy for her as a person, and for The Night Of as a purported hard look at criminal justice. It barely gave its most important character a second glance.

I reviewed The Night Of’s (season?) finale for Decider. A thoroughly disappointing show from start to finish.